The latest Sign-Up.to 2010 UK Email Marketing Benchmark Report (Q1 & 2) analysed over 200 million email marketing messages sent through their online marketing platform in the 6 months from 1st January - 30th June 2010. The breakdown of statistics by sector did not paint a very flattering picture for the HR/Recruitment industry.

HR/Recruitment on first glance has taken a hammering, seeing click-to-open rate drop from 21.70% to 3.51%. Such a massive decline deserved some investigation - what we found was exactly what we mentioned above - the majority of these campaigns have switched to detailing all of the required information in the body of the email and soliciting responses by email rather than through a website.

Overall

Open rate: 17.98%

Click-through rate: 3.56%

Unsubscription rate: 0.20%

HR/Recruitment Sector

Open rate: 18.55%

Click-through rate: 0.65%

Unsubscription rate: 0.22%

The chart below gives us a good indication of the level of engagement that the email campaigns themselves generate, by looking at the proportion of people who click on a campaign after opening it. Where the aim of a campaign isnít to generate a click to a landing page (in the case of informational emails or those designed to elicit a response by email) this isnít a good measure but for most industries itís a very good way to compare engagement.